Written after the one-word prompt - "Jacket"
Dust jackets on books. I really, really don't like them. They get in the way. They get shabby and tear at the edges when a book is repeatedly put on and taken off a shelf. They come untucked and flap at me as if to say, "Hey! Look at ME! Never mind what's inside - look at me!"
I know people like that. They are all in your face dust-cover, trying to detract from what is really going on inside them.
When I buy a new book, I automatically peel off the dust jacket and discard it. Sometimes the cover of the book underneath is more or less the same as the paper covering it. But more often than not I am left with the plain board cover with the book's title and author printed plainly on the spine. Perhaps the publisher thought that a dust jacket would somehow help the book to sell. But the books I buy are normally ones that even the library doesn't carry and as such are part of a niche market. I figure the people who read these books could care less about what the cover looks like.
I buy a lot of hardcover books, especially for my work. Library fines can be crippling, so for books that I figure on looking at regularly, it's easier just to buy them.
Eames watches me with undisguised perturbation as I jettison the dust jackets.
"Don't those things have useful information on them?" she finally queries, unable to stay quiet any longer. "Author bio? ISBN Number? Emergency helpline numbers?"
I look up at her. "Yeah, but I don't want any of that," I explain simply. "I'm just interested in the text."
"'Never judge a book by it's cover'?"
"Now when have you ever know me to do THAT?"
When I was young, maybe nine or ten, my mom still worked occasionally at the Canarsie Library in Rockaway Parkway. It was a brand-new building, low rise, and for years after it was built they were still moving books around in there. I'd have to go along after school so she could 'keep an eye' on me. Frank never had to go. But in truth, although I made out I was acting up over it being "not fair!", I was perfectly happy in the library. I reckon my mom knew that - I told her as much before she died, anyhow, and she wasn't surprised.
Invariably she would put me to work fixing up new dust covers for books which had lost theirs, or which had become so dog-eared as to lower the whole tone of the place, if my mother's anxiety over it were to be believed. She felt that bad looking books encouraged disrespectful behaviour towards them ... almost as though she invested each book with a personality and a character of its own. I had to help her bring these poor tattered tomes back to respectability by covering them with cheap salmon-pink or orange construction paper and another layer of acetate.
Mom'd hand write the book's title and author on a white adhesive label and as a special treat I'd get to fix it - once done, no turning back - on the spine of the book.
Then I'd one-finger type out the Dewey number onto another label and if I was incredibly lucky I would get to ink up the big wood and rubber 'THIS BOOK IS FROM THE BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY - Canarsie' stamp and press it against the front cover. I was a cowboy, branding book-shaped steers. Later on Mom would use the special perforation stamp somewhere else in the book to further deter would-be rustlers.
This taught me a really valuable fist lesson in criminal profiling. Sitting in the Canarsie library on a Wednesday afternoon with the smell of other people's dust and cigarette smoke, I learnt that no matter what you do to change the outside cover of a book, how many times you stamp it as the "Property Of ..." or how many times you throw the dust jacket away, you can't ever change what is inside.